Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

4
  • Agreed, Python is not a toy language... However, many of the organizations at my company use Java extensively, and we will need to interface with their code, and therefore it is a requirement that we bring on people with a strong Java background. Plus it's not so much the perception of the people who understand software that is a concern - it's the perception of those who don't. Those are the people who want a name they've heard before, and that name is "Java"... I would love us to build up a team committed to Python as a primary language, but that will be difficult. Commented Nov 16, 2013 at 17:23
  • 1
    Even if you prototype in Python and rewrite part or all of it in Java, that's not necessarily a bad thing (python doesn't have the performance profile that some applications need). Having "heard" of a language is not exactly a ringing endorsement. Given the choice, I would personally choose some other language than Java, but other forces often dictate language choice. Commented Nov 16, 2013 at 18:00
  • @Robert Harvey: "Isn't rapid prototyping (i.e. iterative and incremental development) sort of the whole point of Agile?": As far as I understand, rapid prototyping means to make a quick, throw-away prototype and, after the customer has approved it, to build a real product (with proper design, etc). In agile you have a compromise between the two: you always have a prototype that is technically "good enough" (probably not as good as a system that has been designed upfront, but good enough for production) so that it can be delivered as a product as soon as the customer is satisfied with it. Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 10:20
  • 1
    @Giorgio: That's fine, but customers don't know what they want until you show it to them and they say "no, that's not what I want, I want this." Whether you do that in code or on a piece of paper makes no difference to me, so long as it identifies what the customer wants. Commented Apr 23, 2014 at 15:31